Inuit all along: Pirate Bay flees Sweden for Greenland

The Pirate Bay has set sail for Greenland after receiving a tip-off suggesting the Swedish authorities were about to seize its current domain.

Owners of the world’s largest file-sharing site lifted anchor on Tuesday night and moved from their current address to the .gl domain in a bid to evade Swedish cyber-cops.

British filesharers could benefit from the change, which comes with a new IP address, because most ISPs now block the current server.

However, a quick and unscientific test by El Reg revealed that Virgin Media, which opposed blocking TPB in the first place, still does not allow customers to access the site.

The owners of the site, which temporarily renamed itself The Hydra Bay back in February in tribute to the site’s constant sprouting of new heads, seem intent on keeping it going. They vowed to keep playing “whack-a-mole” with the authorities.

For now though, the .gl site looks to be permanent.

This is The Pirate Bay’s second move in just over a year. In 2012, it moved from the .org domain in a bid to avoid the attentions of the American authorities.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, a TPB insider revealed fears that the Swedish authorities were about to strike in the hope of removing the website from the internet for good. The threats are not merely idle. Last year, a Swedish court ordered the seizure of the p2ptv.se domain, which offered free streams of hockey and football matches (report - in Swedish). The owners of that site are launching an appeal.

The prosecutor in the case suggested the same process could be used to sink The Pirate Bay for good.

A visit to TPB reveals that little has changed. Anyone accessing the site is automatically redirected to the new domain and the same options are still available.

In February this year, The Pirate Bay in Sweden handed over responsibility for the site to colleagues in Norway and Spain. Although the site is largely cloud-based - hosted on virtual machines in two countries using separate cloud networks - the Swedish Pirate Party were threatened with legal action and decided to stop using its servers to host the file-sharing site.

A statement said:

As some of you may know, we are 99% cloud based today. We have though, enjoyed the great company of the swedish Pirate party. As they have gotten a severe legal threat (that will cost a lot to defend against) we’ve taken the decision to move on to Norway and Spain.

According to Google, there have been 870,923 requests to remove the Pirate Bay from its listings. ®